The Meter Made Me Do It

Even though I’ve been known to not want to know I do find knowing can save you money. Take for instance knowing how much it costs to run your toaster, refrigerator etc. Or knowing how much an average meal costs to make.

My Husband (the “why” boy) came across a wonderful gadget that measures kilowatt usage for any appliance. It is called the Kill A Watt. Our library here had one available to borrow. Now we have one of our own. He even started dreaming up a home school study unit using the thing.

So let’s make this practical. In our wild edible and medicinal blog I reported on how to infuse herbs with a crock-pot. So now I will tell you what amount of energy and cost that involved running the pot for 5 hours.

It is very simple to use the Kill A Watt meter. First plug the meter into the wall socket or an electric strip as you can see in the picture. Then plug your appliance into the meter. Operate the appliance as usual.

We are only concerned with two readings. When you press the word Watt on the meter it will tell you how many watts that particular appliance is taking right then. The far right button on the meter has KWH above it and Hour below. When you press that once it will tell you how many total kilowatts you have used and press it again to see how many hours you have been using it. That’s how our particular model reads.

Now, I take a look at my electric bill to see what a kilowatt costs.I just took the total of the electric bill and divided it by the kilowatts we used. It came out to 12 cents a kilowatt. As you can see from the picture for the 5 hrs and 38 minutes the crock-pot was on I used .34 kilowatts. It cost me 4 cents in electricity to infuse my herbs. Ta Da!!!!